Sunday, 4 August 2013

A ride past City Hall, a rally - and why I probably should have joined in

As I peered through the arches at the bottom of Manhattan’s imposing
borough hall the other Saturday, I could hear a distinctive voice echoing round
the area inside, outside the New York Police Department headquarters. Al
Sharpton - who is, depending on one's point of view either a veteran civil rights campaigner or a rabble-rouser – was addressing a rally of thousands of people. They
included Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin, the young, black teenager
murdered last year in Florida.
The rally was protesting over the trial of Trayvon’s killer, which a week
earlier had led to the killer’s acquittal on all charges.

Manhattan Borough Hall: its design alone
shows how close the city wants to be to
street-level concerns

My better self – which is even more outraged at the
continued racist treatment of many black people in the United States
than the rest of me – urged me to lock up my bike and join the protest, changing my plans to cycle in the day's stifling heat up to Westchester County. The rest of me was
bearing in mind that it was already nearly lunchtime and, if I was to complete
my planned 50-mile round-trip, I’d better keep riding onward. My least noble side wondered whether a
rally over the fate of a young, black man in Florida
was really the most relevant protest for a middle-aged white Briton resident in
New York to
join. The rest of me won the latest of many easy victories over my better self
and we all rode on.

Yet, on the day of the protest, I was feeling so profoundly
exercised about another issue that I would gladly have abandoned my ride to Yonkers to protest about it. The previous evening, Hilda Cohen, a New York cycle activist
whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a couple of times, had described online the series of events that led to her receiving two criminal charges over her cycling on her way home. Her crime had, essentially, been to encounter a police
trap for cyclists and two officers frustrated at her failure to do anything
wrong. When she protested that, no, they couldn’t charge her for riding through
a yellow light, they charged her for reckless operation of a bicycle and
obstructing traffic – because she had left the street’s narrow (non-compulsory)
bike lane to navigate round their police car.

The treatment of Hilda – a conscientious cyclist known for
her enthusiastic opposition to bad cycling behaviour – filled me with the mixture
of rage and personal fear that only a deep injustice that impinges on one
personally can. “If it can happen to her, it can happen to you,” the Invisible
Visible Woman pointed out to me.

On my way back from Westchester:
Not shown, my better self (absent)

Hilda’s treatment crystallised for me a sense that just by
riding a bike daily in New York
I was putting myself in the way of harassment from the city’s police
department. Since the launch of the city’s Citibike bikeshare scheme, the
police have increased the number of ticket traps they operate to catch
cyclists, often stationing themselves on, for example, quiet sidewalks by
uneven, cobbled streets. The clear intention has been to maximise the number of
tickets issued, regardless of the relative innocuousness of the targeted
behaviour.

A series of events since have reinforced my sense that there
are many people worldwide – in positions of varying authority – who feel towards cyclists the
mixture of resentment and violent rage that racists feel about those different
from them. The Friday after my ride to Westchester, I was disturbed to read
another account of anti-cyclist harassment from London
– this time from Elisabeth Anderson, a young London
cycle blogger – describing how two cars drove straight at a group of cyclists towards the end of that evening’s Critical Mass ride in central London. One motorist
deliberately drove over one of the victims “like a speed bump,” Anderson recounted.

A street in Cathcart, Glasgow. The cyclist here has
the same obligation to keep this road safe as all the cars,
according to a breathtakingly misguided campaign.

My anger hasn’t been at all assuaged by the launch last
Monday in Scotland,
my home country, of a bizarre “road safety” campaign, known as the Nice Way Code,
paid for from the Scottish government’s cycling budget, urging all road users
to show each other “mutual respect”. The campaign, which claims that all road
users have an equal duty to make the roads safe, is a stinging slap in the face
for the relatives of most vulnerable road users killed on Scotland’s
roads. However little role their loved one’s own behaviour had in his or her
death, it seems to suggest, maybe it wouldn’t have happened if the victim had
shown the perpetrator more “mutual respect”.

The clearest point to make is that, as a cyclist, I have the
distinct advantage over other groups the police and politicians don’t like. I –
and the vast majority of cyclists in the UK and US – am able most of the
time to exercise the privileges of being a reasonably well-off, articulate,
well-connected member of the professional classes. Were I to be shot dead on
the street tomorrow by a vigilante, provided my bike wasn’t involved, my death
would be treated very differently from that of Trayvon Martin. My assailant’s
murder trial probably wouldn’t be allowed to turn into a trial of my posthumous
reputation.

It consequently makes little sense to put cyclists’ problems
in the same bracket as those of, say, the non-white people rounded up on the
street in the UK for no reason other than their having no immediate way of
proving their right to be in the country. I would expect, through legal due
process or moral persuasion, to be able to get out of patently unjust, trumped-up
charges such as those Hilda Cohen faces. I will be still more alarmed about the general state of New York justice if Hilda doesn't succeed in having her charges overturned.

A New York food delivery biker. Want to know how the
authorities would like to treat you, New York cyclists?
Look at how they regulate this guy.

In fact, however unfair the harassment that commuter cyclists can face, the plight of New York’s food delivery cyclists shows how much worse things could be. A city council that frequently seems
bored by the challenges of New York’s
high road deaths rate seems never to tire of thinking up new regulations to
make the already trying lives of the delivery cyclists - mostly poor immigrants - more difficult. New York's articulate bike lobby might not be, as the bizarre Dorothy Rabinowitz has claimed, "all-powerful" but it has at least saved commuter cyclists from food delivery rider style registration and over-regulation.

Nevertheless, it’s hard not to see striking similarities
between aspects of some drivers' and police forces' stances towards
cyclists and the general climate of prejudice that some racial and other minorities face. It’s hard, for
example, not to see the police’s harassment of Hilda Cohen and disproportionate ticketing of cyclists as another expression
of the attitudes that have made the NYPD such enthusiastic advocates of “stop
and frisk” – the department’s tactic of stopping and searching large numbers of
young, mostly black males on minimal pretexts. It’s hard to escape the idea
that some policemen’s instincts are that both minorities and cyclists represent
potential trouble, needing constant reminders to keep in their place.

The violence of many people’s language when talking about cyclists and their desire to run them over is also clearly reminiscent of
racism. Incidents like the one Elisabeth Anderson witnessed, where drivers use
their vehicles as weapons, are a still more disgusting expression of that same
kind of impotent, incoherent rage against the different.

The Nice Way Code, meanwhile, is a reminder of prejudice’s
insidiousness. The campaign’s authors have been busy protesting since its
launch that its intentions are good. But it’s
hard not also to see their insistence that cyclists can’t expect to be respected
until they behave better as a new expression of old kinds of prejudice. Yes,
rape is awful – but why did she wear such a short skirt? Hey, we’re letting you
vote in Mississippi
– now forget the uppity manners that Dr King taught you, boy.

NYPD squad cars: when I'm on my bike, I think the
"Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect" motto on the side is
satire. When I'm walking, I see it as a reassuring promise

The cyclist’s plight, in other words, reflects a rottenness
in some police and public attitudes with, it seems to me, similar roots to racism, homophobia
and misogyny. It reflects a refusal to extend equal legal protection to all
that should worry even people who never ride a bicycle. In the worst cases,
anti-cyclist attitudes can leave a person dead, as Trayvon Martin is, yet
failed by the legal system, as he has been.

There needs, however, to be some other word –
“justice-denied groups,” perhaps? – for those of us fortunate enough to be able to choose our fate. I might wince when I see an NYPD squad car while cycling,
fearing the officers will invent a crime for me to have committed. My
experience of that feeling should, perhaps, have made me dismount and stand
with Trayvon Martin’s mother. But I must also bear in mind that I have the
privilege of putting my bike away and walking down the street. As a middle-aged, affluent white man, I can at least choose to have less to fear
from the police than many millions of less fortunate fellow UK citizens and inhabitants of New York.

Cycling as a "minority" activity is more akin to homosexuality than race or gender since cyclists can avoid offending the bigots simply by "staying behind the windshield," just as homosexuals can "stay in the closet." Racial and gender targets do not have that option.

I did ponder this question when writing. I'm not sure it's an exact comparison. It's a different kind of choice to hide one's sexual orientation - a fairly fundamental part of anyone's identity - than to change one's mode of transport. But I agree with your fundamental premise that cyclists find it easier to get away from the harassment than most other groups that the police don't like.

Perhaps it is similar to a religion which one can choose to join or not to join. Indeed, I know of many people in Toronto who stopped using cars for religious reasons when that city's Medical Officer of Health came out with his findings that car drivers kill 440 people in that city every year by poisoning them with their lethal pollution.

Since their religious beliefs included the commandment "Thou shalt not kill," participating in the mass slaughter of 440 innocent people was something that they decided not to do.

It seems to me that when the police harass someone who is cycling for religious reasons, it is religious discrimination and religious persecution. For that, we have certain human rights laws.

This report may be found here:http://www.toronto.ca/health/hphe/pdf/air_pollution_burden.pdf

Is there similar data for New York? I know that car drivers poison and kill a lot of people. Do we have hard numbers for it.

We're getting into pretty deep waters when we start talking about religious discrimination. It would be a brave man, for example, who tried to separate the traditional anti-Catholic discrimination in the area where I grew up between discrimination based on what Catholics believe and the people's being mostly of Irish ethnic origin.

The comparison I had in mind when I wrote the piece for anti-cyclist discrimination was a very sad case a few years ago of a young woman in England who was murdered because she was a Gothic punk. It was clearly her choice to adopt that identity - but as abhorrent as any other hate crime that people could choose to kill her because of her identity.

On the point about pollution, I don't know the figures for New York (though others may). But respiratory illnesses from traffic pollution generally kill hundreds of people (especially the very old and very young) around any big city.

BTW, I went to the rally you mentioned. I was moved by Sharpton's eloquent and inclusive outrage against not only the racism but the stand-your-ground law that enabled Trayvon Martin's killing and Zimmerman's acquittal. It felt good to stand with Sybrina Fulton.

En route to the rally, nearly at the site, I was almost doored when a man exited a car in mid-street. I stopped my bike and called out to the man, an African-American, "I can't believe you opened your door without looking or pulling over." He stared at me, blankly, I thought, as his family followed him from the car. I added, "I'm going to the same place you're going; we need to look out for each other," to which he nodded appreciatively, I thought.

Thanks for your kind words. I'm aware here I'm treading ground that people such as you have been treading far longer than I.

Part of what I'm trying to say, I guess, is that we tend to care about our own civil rights in the areas that most closely affect us - and rather less in the areas that don't. Your story about the man who nearly doored you bears that out.

As a former trial lawyer (and having both prosecuted and defended criminal actions), I have a little bit different take on the Zimmerman trial. Like it or not, our standard to convict of criminal offenses is "beyond a reasonable doubt" which means a single juror can prevent a conviction. When I was prosecuting, it infuriated me when the evidence was clear. When I was a defense attorney, it gave me hope when a case was close. As imperfect as it is, it is the only system we have, and if I am the accused, one I will passionately cling to as my best hope. Agitation and action should be focused on changing bad laws, not breeding and promoting disrespect for the system. On the other hand, I recognize that the system does have problems that legislators need to address -- not as a result of riots and violent actions, but because it is the right thing to do.

That said, when Hilda's case comes up, I suggest NYC cyclists who are concerned ought to do a silent ride in to the courthouse, and fill the rows and halls with visible, respectful, behavior -- the kind that reassures judges and those invested in the system, and gives them a clear path to doing the right thing.

I guess my hope and prayer is that we will each be moved to do the right thing individually, no matter our place in society, and a critical mass that grows from that will give those in authority a clear path to a more humane existence for all of us.

My brain goes round and round on these questions as I try to answer my kids' queries such as, "if the American revolution was fought today, would the "patriots" be terrorists?" Sigh...

You'll note that I didn't express an opinion over the outcome of the Martin case. It annoys me when people express firm opinions about legal cases and jurors' findings when they haven't spent the days and hours in the courtroom listening to the detail of the evidence. The defence in George Zimmerman's trial certainly seems to have planted enough doubt in jurors' minds that they didn't convict. None of us, I suppose, knows what we'd have thought if we'd heard the same evidence under the same circumstances.

I guess my point, however, is that there are certain groups that persistently seem to come off badly from the criminal justice system as currently constituted. Those include vulnerable road users and minority groups. My concern over the Trayvon Martin case is that I think the case would have been regarded in a different light (as the President has said) if it had involved Trayvon Martin shooting George Zimmerman in self-defence.

The problem isn't, I think, the adversarial system, which has, as you say, many advantages. It's that the wider society that the jurors represent is rife with unpleasant, prejudiced opinions.

There's no easy solution for it - except for everybody slowly to learn better.

The Nice Way Code videos and posters remind me of the strange "Standoff" video that People For Bikes released in May 2013 (for bike month):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0Ev2MWRUT4Both campaigns assume a degree of symmetry between drivers and cyclists which does not exist. And both seem to have let their quirkiness get a bit out of hand.

My view is that we are in a period where aggressive conformism is on the rise. I mean by this the kind of conformism where people feel hatred of 'the other', those who are different to them, and start to find ways to demonise them and attack them, even if (or should that be 'especially if') the other party is the weaker one. So we see a rise of the rich blaming the poor for economic problems, of drivers hating (and attacking) cyclists, of the sick being blamed for their medical problems and so on.

It's pretty unedifying to watch. And I agree the Nice Way code is just pandering to that aggression, rather than challenging the underlying assumptions it rests on.

Thanks for the comment. I'm more optimistic than you are, however. I remember when I was growing up in Scotland in the late 1970s racism was far more acceptable than it is now. Misogyny also went generally unquestioned. As for homophobia, I don't think it occurred to anybody not to be prejudiced against gays.

But, of course, because I'm optimistic I'm especially frustrated over the Nice Way Code. I believe that prejudices can be overturned with decent information and debate. It's a tragedy to see the resources spent on a campaign that reinforces prejudices.

Yeah, I wouldn't say everything is going to hell in a handbasket, some things clearly have got better over the years. I just think in terms of the tide of opinion, there is a hardening of this kind of thinking in response to the recent economic problems, everyone feeling a bit more pissed off and looking for scapegoats.

There has been a hardening of attitudes in many areas - that's for sure. At least the big downturn hasn't turned our times into the 1930s yet, however - even if Greece's polarised politics sometimes look worrying like that.

About Me

I'm a hefty, 6ft 5in Scot. I moved back to London in 2016 after four years of living and cycling in New York City. Despite my size, I have a nearly infallible method of making myself invisible. I put on an eye-catching helmet, pull on a high visibility jacket, reflective wristbands and trouser straps, get on a light blue touring bicycle and head off down the road. I'm suddenly so hard to see that two drivers have knocked me off because, they said, they didn't see me.
This blog is an effort to explain to some of the impatient motorists stuck behind me, puzzled friends and colleagues and - perhaps most of all myself - why being a cyclist has become almost as important a part of my identity as far more important things - my role as a husband, father, Christian and journalist. It seeks to do so by applying the principles of moral philosophy - which I studied for a year at university - and other intellectual disciplines to how I behave on my bike and how everyone uses roads.